Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Guardian’s Open Platform is open for business. The Guardian’s Content API is now out of beta. Of particular interest: you can access basic article metadata (headline, URL and tags) without using an API key at all, and the API supports JSONP—just request format=json and include a callback=foo argument. # 20th May 2010, 5:40 pm

Google Charts release notes, February 2010. More new Google Charts Image API features I hadn’t noticed before: charts of large data sets can now be generated using a POST request, but the killer feature is the ability to add ?chof=validate to see useful error messages. ?chof=json is interesting too—it gives you back a JSON object detailing the coordinates of various interesting shapes on the associated chart, which you can then use to create your own image maps or JavaScript tooltips. It’s a shame it doesn’t support JSON-P. # 27th April 2010, 12:07 pm

jsondns. A JSONP API for making DNS queries, with a nice URL structure. # 30th December 2009, 5:37 pm

Djangopeople JSON parser. Awesome—Andy McKay has compensated for the lack of an official DjangoPeople API by creating a JSONP screen scraped API and hosting it on App Engine. As far as I’m concerned this is an officially supported feature—I’ll make sure future site changes don’t break it, and when I do add an API I’ll try to keep it compatible and help Andy set up redirects. # 28th November 2009, 11:29 am

JSONP Memory Leak. Neil Fraser advocates iterating over and deleting every property on a JSONP script DOM node after you removeChild it from the DOM, to protect against memory leaks of “in excess of 15 MB per hour”. # 28th July 2009, 12:46 pm

JS-Placemaker—geolocate texts in JavaScript. Chris Heilmann exposed Placemaker to JavaScript (JSONP) using a YQL execute table. Try his examples—I’m impressed that “My name is Jack London, I live in Ontario” returns just Ontario, demonstrating that Placemaker’s NLP is pretty well tuned. # 23rd May 2009, 12:36 am

With YQL Execute, the Internet becomes your database. This is nuts (in a good way). Yahoo!’s intriguing universal SQL-style XML/JSONP web service interface now supports JavaScript as a kind of stored procedure language, meaning you can use JavaScript and E4X to screen-scrape web pages, then query the results with YQL. # 29th April 2009, 10:50 pm

Combine JSONP and jQuery to quickly build powerful mashups. jQuery’s JSONP support is one of my favourite little-known features of the library. # 3rd March 2009, 3:17 pm

husk.org. a flickr machine tag browser (via) Flickr recently added API methods for exploring the machine tags used by the community. Paul Mison has built a neat OS X Finder style interface for exploring them, using JSONP and jQuery. # 15th December 2008, 11:24 pm

YQL—converting the web to JSON with mock SQL. YQL just got a whole lot more interesting to me—I had no idea they were exposing an HTML and RSS scraping tool over a JSONP API in addition to all of the Yahoo! web service methods. # 13th December 2008, 9:39 am

CSSHttpRequest (via) Devious cross-domain Ajax hack that uses CSS for transport (@import rules with data URIs, but it still works in IE). Similar to JSONP but safer, since JSONP can cause arbitrary JavaScript to execute. # 23rd October 2008, 6:25 pm

FriendFeed launch a real-time API. This is huge: JSONP plus long polling Comet, with “everything since X” tokens to ensure you don’t miss anything. This is the first open Comet API I’ve seen anywhere. Combine this with FriendFeed’s regular API (which allows arbitrary message posting) and you’ve got a really powerful tool for hackers who want to experiment with Comet without rigging up their own infrastructure. # 22nd October 2008, 2:18 pm

Page Inlink Analyzer (via) Here’s why I’m so keen on JSONP APIs—Eric Miraglia’s tool fires off dozens of cross-domain JSON requests to pull together information about inbound links to your site from Yahoo! Site Explorer and del.icio.us. I imagine it would have been uneconomic for him to provide the tool if it had to proxy every request through his own server. # 15th October 2008, 5:23 pm

Tweetersation. Nat and my latest side project: a JSONP API powered tool to more easily follow conversations between people on Twitter, by combining their tweets in to a single timeline. # 2nd October 2008, 5:08 pm

freebase-suggest (via) A jQuery plugin that performs auto-completion against the Freebase JSONP API, and allows the results to be limited to specific categories or subsets. # 24th September 2008, 11:58 pm

addSizes.js: Snazzy automatic link file-size generation. Posted to Nat’s snazzy new blog: a script that uses my json-head API to grab the file size of linked documents on a page and insert those sizes in to the document. # 30th August 2008, 10:39 am

WolfenFlickr 3D—An unlikely mashup. Brilliant: Wolfenstein 3D style raycasting in JavaScript with images on the walls that have been pulled in using Flickr’s JSONP API. # 29th August 2008, 10:24 am

json-tinyurl. Because sometimes you want to be able to create a shorter version of a URL directly from JavaScript without hosting your own server-side proxy. # 27th August 2008, 10:58 am

IMG-2-JSON (via) I’m not the only person deploying simple JSON-P APIs on App Engine: Adam Burmister’s tool extracts dimension, mimetype and EXIF metadata when provided the URL to an image file. # 12th August 2008, 9:43 am

json-head. I’ve deployed another App Engine mini-app, which provides a JSON-P API for running HEAD requests against an arbitrary URL (useful for checking things like Content-Length and Content-Type headers and whether a URL returns 200). App Engine’s urlfetch limitations mean it can only deal with port 80 and 443 requests. # 29th July 2008, 3:41 pm

Dopplr place googlemaps, with and without Yahoo Geo API bounding box adjustment. Dopplr uses Geonames for most geo information, but is now mixing in bounding box data from the Yahoo! Geo web service to improve the default zoom level for their maps. The JSON callback API means no server-side code is required on Dopplr’s end. # 17th May 2008, 11:35 pm

Social Graph API. This is freaking awesome. Input one or more URLs to your profile pages and it returns a huge dump of crawled relationship data, based on XFN, FOAF and OpenID links. No API key required and it supports JSON callbacks so you can incorporate it in to a site without even needing to write any extra server-side code. # 3rd February 2008, 10:34 pm

The Art & Science of JavaScript. The JavaScript book I contributed to is now shipping! My chapter describes how to build a Flickr / Google Maps mashup entirely using client-side code (via JSON-P). # 12th January 2008, 7:05 pm